Heaven In a Wild Flower
by CampionSayn
Summary: Ayla, Garth and Mekt. That was how the young girl knew all things and that was what kept her going in that form of a Wake Angel or dangerous cloud. It was such a pity that two from the trinity of siblings are often missing from her side. Bonus chapter!
1. Heaven in the Flower

Title: Heaven in a Wild Flower  
>Summary: Ayla, Garth and Mekt. That was how the young girl knew all things and that was what kept her going in that form of a Wake Angel or dangerous cloud. It was such a pity that two from the trinity of siblings are often missing from her side. One-shot, sibling fic, minor hints at Lightning-cest.<br>Warning: Very, very, very light hints at incest, but not really; it's more like brotherly affection than anything else.  
>Disclaimer: I don't own Legion or any characters used in this and make no money off of this.<p>

Does anyone else agree that Mekt is a really unappreciated character? I mean, really, Cosmic Boy gets more fanfiction time than him, and a lot of people don't like Mr. Pompous, so how is that fair?

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><p><em>-:-<br>To see the world in a grain of sand,  
>And Heaven in a wild flower,<br>Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,  
>And eternity in an hour.<br>-Auguries of Innocence._

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><p>There is no greater joy that Ayla now knows, than that of being back on Winath and out of the vortex and wave and ebb or flow of the rest of the universe. It wasn't at all a nightmare being out in the cosmos; a great entity that moved through stars and planets and space mammals that came about to listen to her in ways that so-called intelligent life could not really understand, but she was supremely glad to be back in flesh and blood and with a voice of her own.<p>

Life now is strange, being suspended in time as she was, it is difficult to know Garth as he is now, when he can visit and get away from Legion duties. He is now longer her twin, not really, but her big brother, as Mekt was big brother before this happened and they were children.

Well, she is still a child, and they are young men.

She helps her parents tend to their farm again, with them so happy to have her back and keeping a close eye on her that drives her a little in a bad way, but she knows that they can't help it. She is still so small and though she is a little wiser now than she was then, it is not by much and she understands that they do not wish for harm of any kind to come to her. Not even by the sting of a red breasted bird coming down to snatch away little strands of her hair as when she and Garth tended the fields and picked out the nasty weeds that sometimes sprouted up to devour the crops. Her mother especially is so high strung these days, with Garth zipping about the galaxy with his friends to fight off that Imperiex person who Mekt had left to save her.

Brushing away these thoughts that she had been having a lot lately, she stood on tiptoe out in the fields, enjoying the warm sun touching every cell of her skin in the little green dress her father had brought out of the attic once summer started wandering the planet to set up residence again.

She was picking out the weeds that were stuffing themselves about every spare space that they could find where Ayla remembered she and Garth planting strawberries while Mekt shoveled and raked twelve yards behind them so that he could plant the blackberries and blueberries he knew that they'd end up eating because he cared much less for the darker shaded sweets and they cared even less for the pink delicacies that they had to wash so carefully in heated water and disinfectant before consuming.

They'd spent a lot of their childhoods doing things like that for each other and pretended that they weren't doing it so that the berries would taste even better when they handed over their bounty to the other. Mekt always cleaned the berries he grew very carefully before giving the blueberries to Ayla and the blackberries to Garth.

The older Ranzz sibling was even careful to spit out the dirt still clinging to the strawberries the twins gave in turn when he thought they weren't looking.

Ayla pulled with all of her might at the long grey and putrid green vine that was like the head of the rest and found herself quite inexplicably fallen backwards as it finally snapped from the ground in one long shoot with little wisps and hair of white roots sticking every which way.

The roots almost reminded Ayla of Mekt's new hair coloring when she picked herself from the ground and looked at them a moment. She ran her finger over all of them and they felt smooth to the touch.

She suddenly wondered if that's what Mekt's actual hair felt like now, or if it was as rough as a horse tail as when they were little and it was only he that was taller than her. She hadn't really made to notice before he had turned himself in to the Science Police. She had only noticed how happy he was to see her—perhaps happier than he'd been in a long time if his heavy walk and slumped shoulders were anything to go by—and how determined he was to make things right by going back to jail and absently thinking to herself: Now this is how Mekt must have felt to be without a double, he and Garth look just like polarized twins and I am the odd one out.

The thoughts depressed her—almost like that time when she caught the boys alone in the creek without their clothes; their own private secret between boys that she would not interrupt and did not because no one was hurt and her older brother deserved a some fun when so many people judged him for being with no twin sister to level out his…being a boy, she guessed—and she tossed the weed into the pile that she was going to take back to the incinerator that she had finally convinced her parents to let her use again.

The strawberry patch looked perfect and she made to draw her hands to the rim of her dress and carry the weeds back like her skirt length was a net, but then she paused and looked over to Mekt's patch.

It was like nobody at all had taken care of it since she had disappeared. Her and Garth's patch looked like it had basically been maintained by Garth when he visited a few times a year and even by her parents occasionally, but Mekt's area where so many delicious berries had bloomed every April through August looked….

Ayla remembered Garth muttering occasionally over the vid-phone (every week that he called to check up on Ayla and tell her about his latest mission sometimes) to their parents that Mekt was making up for, well Ayla guessed, losing her those years ago and basically causing the accident that lead to the boys getting their powers. She got how her mom was starting to respond to the calls they got from Takron-Galtos when Mekt called when he got his time once every two weeks if he was allowed to, and her dad was toning down on this disappointed frown he got when Mekt was brought up in conversation, but now she was getting a bigger piece of the picture. Whereas Mekt had never been very much a part of the family when it was normal, he had basically become completely ostracized when the accident happened. It was worse than not being a twin on a planet whose population was built in doubles ("must have either a same-sex twin or an identical twin to sit here or go here or participate here" in a lot of school functions) and maybe she could understand why he had become a bad guy for a while.

His berry patch, while hers and Garth's had been a wreck, Mekt's was a nightmare. It looked as though the rain hadn't even given a thought of sparing water to it the day she turned into cosmic energy. The little wooden sign that the three of them had painted with little berries to warn what was there had broken—or perhaps been intentionally smashed—around the middle and lay in pieces covered in dust and the weeds she had spent the better part of the morning getting rid of for the strawberries to flourish had overrun the entire plot. The row that the berries had grown now served as little beds for the weeds to nest in and cultivate, some of their own gross flowers that attracted hornets standing tall as though to say "_Haha, we win!"_

She dropped the weeds she made to pick up to incinerate and, as though defending…Mekt or her own head, she wasn't sure; she leaned over and picked every last one of the weed flowers and made back the way to the barn. She had an idea and woe be it to mom or dad if they had something to say about it.

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><p>The Legion cruiser in all of its grand design and line and means of propulsion landed sleek and fine into the front yard of the Ranzz property. Dust scattered up from where it touched down and from the engines exercising that last ounce of power before turning off, but other than that it was like a mere and very sedate, over-sized whale beaching in the sand on the beach.<p>

Garth stepped off of the cruiser, grinning ear to ear and quite happy that he'd finally gotten some time off from Legion duties. Begging Brainy for a break had been demeaning and humiliating, but it had worked and was on its way to being well into worth it as he looked about for a moment. His parents were nowhere to be seen, no doubt having a meeting with the other farmers in the area about getting ready to till and seed the soil, but out of the corner of his scar covered eye, he caught movement of light ginger hair and a green dress way out in the fields.

Whistling a song he had been plagued with for the last month because of Bouncy and his sprocking old movies, '_…I would change my ways; No, never mind, God knows I've tried. Call me a sinner, call me a saint…_' he moved in a sort of jaunty swagger to where his sister was moving about like a little bunny playing in a briar patch, in and out, in and out.

Coming upon the sight he had not been expecting, Garth made no motion or sound to draw Ayla's attention as she was hard at work and he just wanted to suck in the sight of it all at the moment.

With the old shovels and rakes that had been stored in the barn since as long as any of them could remember and had only ever really used when the machines and robots were out of commission—save for when he and his twin and Mekt wanted to have a bit of solitary fun among themselves, like digging a hole to the center of Winath or using the holes that only came up to their chests to fill up with water that they could wade in to take shelter from the blazing summer sun—Ayla was scurrying from one end of Mekt's berry patch to the other. She had dragged up and hauled out all of the loathsome weeds that Garth remembered from his last visit to having taken up the entire plot to raise their own seedlings and deposited them into a wheelbarrow. They took up quite a lot of room in the thing and he smiled at how much work must have been done because of that. At least an hour it might have taken, maybe more.

Her dress was dirty and mom when hate that, but she looked so cute all scuffed up and gritty. A real farm girl getting in deep where she was supposed to.

"Hey, Ayla," he finally spoke up after a few minutes of watching her trail the large rake with the fifteen long teeth of black metal behind her to make rows for whatever she hoped to plant, "What are you doing here?"

Dropping the tool in surprise, Ayla spun around with a bright smile on her face, "Garth!"

As she ran up to him, she almost tripped on one of the holes that came about because of a yanked weed, but caught herself and ended up hugging her brother's leg like a vice. He patted the top on her head with his flesh hand.

"Mom and dad didn't say that you were visiting today," the tiny ginger stated, reeling back her head so she could look all the way up at his face with her own bright smile lit up, "If they had I would have waited for you to help me with this!"

"Eh, I wanted to surprise you guys," he shrugged, crouching down so she didn't snap her neck just trying to make eye contact, "But what is all of…this?"

She flashed her arms out to present the plot, shovel sticking up from where she stuck it in the ground like a javelin at a target, rake laying in the fresh dirt like a comfortable twig in mud and the little sign cracked in half put back together with glue and bits of string, "Isn't it obvious? I'm getting it ready for when Mekt comes out of Takron-Galtos! It really isn't fair that our plot was kinda taken care of when his was left to rot."

And from the mere statement of truth that comes from the mouth of a child, comes a spike of embarrassed shame that wound from the top of Garth's frazzled, disheveled hair, all the way down to his dirt stained boots. His face contorted so that he was biting the inside of his cheek and his eyebrows crashed together like two star cruisers at high speeds, added on with an effect of his entire face going a lovely shade of bright red.

The childish urge to remark on the fact that Mekt had been engaged in crime for quite a while wanted to slither from his lips, but Garth stifled it by letting his shoulders sulk and his head sink between his knees.

"Yeah," he finally said when Ayla started poking the top of his head with a little worry that he could even move from being happy to see her to being kinda depressed in a blink, "That was really lousy. Um, sorry?"

Ayla smiled at her twin. It was fun knowing that she could still make him guilty over stuff when he was twice her size now.

"It's okay," she said innocently, "You can make it up by helping me clean the rest of it and then figure out how to dial Takron-Galtos so we can tell Mekt what we're doing."

Garth gave her an "I-know-what-you're-doing" look and, without warning, picked her up into his arms to tickle her sides, he squealing while he spoke, "Yeah? Will that make things okay?"

She wiggled in his grip and couldn't reply between breathless laughter and trying to be released.

After a few moments, he let up and let her regain her breath, "But, mom and dad really don't like you trying that dialing of the Prison Planet, so let's go call him now while they're out."

"Really?"

He nodded, swinging her up with one arm onto his shoulders, a position he and she had both come to like when she had first come back from being pure energy; he only looked back at the in-progress plot of dark berries once.

"Yeah, there's plenty of time to finish that later. We've got plenty of time now and at least if we call in the next few minutes, it'll be before Mekt will be having the lunch of kings: Galdorf noodles and Rimbor Dear meatballs. Yum."

Ayla scrunched up her nose at the thought of green noodles that glowed in the dark and moved and the meat that Garth spoke of. Mom had made them eat the meat once as a family and ever since, the _whole family_, stayed away from such food. She couldn't imagine having to eat it in prison.

She wiggled her legs a little to get more comfortable on her brother's shoulders, "Do you think that when the berries grow, we can send him a package in the mail?"

"I don't see why not," the ginger Legionnaire replied, "If they let some inmates have radioactive bird eggs from Titan, I don't see them turning down letting their best inmate have strawberries."


	2. Out of Darkness Comes

Well, here I am again. I told my reviewers that there would be a bonus chapter or a sequel. It took a little longer than I thought it would for this extra snippet to come along, but at least it's here, right? Now Mekt get to have his day in the sun!

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><p><em>-:-<br>A fair request should be followed by the deed in silence.  
>-Dante Alighieri.<em>

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><p>There are worse things in the universe to do while awaiting the chance for parole than doing laundry, but at the moment, Mekt couldn't think of just what.<p>

In his time on Takron-Galtos, he had come to be rather grateful that he had a single cell and not a double-wide in which he would most assuredly have a cell mate. He had read in the books afforded to all inmates during his months on the Prison Planet that back when inmates had been paired in twos that if both of the people were less aggressive, there were no problems, but if one was even slightly bigger than the other, the chances of forced sexual assault doubled.

As such, since he had been brought to the Prison Planet (with his sentence cut to just a year and a half thanks to Garth and the Legion's letters of recommendation), because he was a more feminine inmate—he couldn't deny this, he was very pretty compared to everyone but the female inmates—whenever he was to do some kind of chore that was mandatory for each convict, he was given laundry duty. The guards couldn't do much better than that. If he was put to work in the kitchens, there was the threat that another inmate would wait for the perfect opportunity and then take Mekt quickly and painfully; if they put him to work in the yard (or gym, as it was inside with just a few trees and sand and rocks to make it the convicts more relaxed) someone would beat him to death before the guards could get to him; if Mekt was put on janitorial duty, he could be drowned in one of the toilets.

Sighing and trying not to inhale the smell of the place—cleaning products, stale water, used underwear—Mekt added another load to the washer he was working on. He had been in the place so long that he could recognize Emerald Empress's black bra and lace thong and Alexis's matching pair of underwear with cherries all over them.

'_Seven more months and I'm out of here,'_he just had to keep reminding himself of that fact. Especially as he turned the knob of the washing machine to start it up and it made that horrible shrieking noise that was rather like a bird being crushed under a window frame.

Taking to the other side of the table where laundry clean and dried awaited to be folded into piles and then sent off in bins to be left in the cells of other criminals that had been very much coexisting with the promise of making him suffer as soon as they got out again and he was not protected by the walls of his own cell; Mekt looked to the clock on the wall. Another hour and he could go back to reading about Naltor butterflies and moths on his less than comfortable cot with the bits of thread falling out of it from him picking out lice compliments of the last inmate the cell held.

Amazing how being stuck on a planet filled with sociopaths and ruthless killers could make him actually miss being on Winath with parents that still looked upon him with disdain and contempt, and siblings…

Sprock, he actually missed the gingers.

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><p>He really had to stop using so much bleach. His fingers were cracked and were starting to sting…<p>

With his arms before him in the shackles he was required to wear, his fingers kneading together and his nails tracing the cracks in his skin, two of the guards—one very tall man from Titan that reminded Mekt of the boy Garth ran around with for the first few years with his Legion that his brother had started telling the silver haired Winathian had turned into a jackass over the last year, and a very large woman from Carg that could bench press twice as much as Mekt could—accompanied him and, pausing to open his door, unshackled him and he collapsed onto his bed.

"Oh, wait," the Titan muttered, turning back around from leaving Mekt alone as the Cargarite continued on without stopping.

Mekt lifted his head at the swishing sound of the electric gate of his door shutting down for a moment; the Titan dropped something wrapped in paper tissue onto the edge of his bed and muttered, "This arrived for you this morning. It took a while for customs to make sure it wasn't explosive. Nothing's been ruined, though, so you can't call your lawyer and whine about anything."

With that, the guard put up the shielding again and walked away.

Mekt blinked from the retreating back of guard twice before saying, very low and sort of confused as he was often prone to be on occasions in the prison when he was left alone for too long and got his head smashed into a wall, "Er….thanks?"

He looked instead to the package sitting pleasantly and innocently on his bed. It was about the size of a cake pan and square, the tissue paper was slightly torn, but he could guess it was from the guards treating it as a bomb. And tied to it with twine was a tiny little blue note.

Curious, if not a little suspicious, Mekt took the incentive to poke the thing once. When it didn't explode with dye or something, he brought it into his lap and snatched the card from within the holding of the twine.

Opening the letter, he found two very distinct lots of handwriting. One was dainty and obviously feminine with smiley faces and flowers scrawled here and there in the I's and o's. the other handwriting was legible, but nearly like chicken scratch with a lot of exclamations.

"What the sprock…" was the first thing that came out of Mekt's mouth and into his head.

He read the letters and felt something like a sting in the center of his chest.

The first one was apparently from Ayla, and as to be a gentleman (let it never be said that his mother didn't teach him manners, even if she had been rather angry with him for the last years) he read hers first.

"_Dear, Mekt  
>Guess what me and Garth did? Well, since there's not much that you can guess at behind bars, I'll tell you myself! We cleaned out the berry patch of yours with the blue and black berries! It took forever for the things to grow again after they hadn't had water for such a long time, but it was so worth it. You'd really be proud of me, since I did most of the weed killing before Garth came back to Winath while mom and dad were out! Next time you're out of the slammer—"<em>

Mekt tried not to the first couple times, but he could not help the slight shirk into himself after the mention his little sister made of his being incarcerated. He got that she was still a kid, though, and would not comment on it when next his gingers called him.

"_We can till the patches together! Now we're taking care of both your patch and our patch and Garth keeps telling me not to use so much fertilizer because it keeps attracting the neighbors cats, but oh well. We sent you some strawberries in the package! Have a good time and tell us how it tasted the next time we get to call you. Love you, big brother!"_

In the corner of the letter where his little sister's writing ended, there were two little stick figures. One was in a dress with what appeared to be a shovel and the other one was a guy and had a wheelbarrow. They were each standing over a plot with a big sign that said Mekt's Place.

Mekt found himself smiling with some of his electricity weaving inside his stomach. Or his chest, but it was hard to tell.

Moving onto the second writing, Mekt had to tilt the paper here and there to fully get what exactly it said.

"_Hey, brother. Ayla told you about the plots, I guess, but just so you know, I made sure she didn't overstuff the things with dead fish and horse excrement. The berries she packed for you are clean, I promise! I cleaned them after she did and there's no dirt on them, I swear. Next time we call you, make sure to tell us if they tasted of fish, okay? I'll be over to visit you, hopefully with Ayla and within the next two months (supposing Brainy doesn't assign me to monitor duty on my days off)._

_As Superman has been saying lately—we're trying to teach Kell-El more about the past—I end this message with wishes to your health and the saying 'peace out'."_

It was short, but at the very least, Garth hadn't spewed hate through paper and had actually made to wish Mekt no ill will. It actually made the former villain want to cry a little more.

Hiding the letters under his pillow—the one that smelled like dead roses from the second to last person that used the cell—Mekt opened the package and he actually felt a squeezing in his chest that was feeling. It was unpleasant when after the last half-decade he'd learned not to let that feeling encompass him, but he was slowly getting used to it since his siblings made it their business to include him in…normal stuff.

The little red and pink fruits stared up at them like angels from the food pyramid and begged him to scoop them up and devour them.

He took one up in his hand—the biggest one—and put it on his tongue. After chewing for a moment and swallowing, the fact that there was indeed no dirt on it that he had to spit out allowed a torrent of emotion to well up.

'_Note to self: Do not degrade Garth about his stupid goatee the next time he calls.'_


End file.
